Proceedings Paper

The processing of medical images requires the handling of complex structured sets of elementary objects (images, curves,... and their associated parameters). Usually, an elementary object cannot be interpreted without information concerning the structure to which it belongs (e.g image sequences). Then it is necessary to consider the whole structure like an atomic semantic entity, object of an image data base. As specific tools are necessary to manage these objects, an object oriented handling system (OHS), part of our medical image data base project (BDIM), was developed to perform : i) the array storage management, ii) the interface between applications and the BDIM to have access to objects (create, update, delete...) and components (navigation inside object structures, access to arrays and parameters). The image handling system (IHS) decribed here is the user level part of the OHS. IHS allows the evolution of the data base environment by adding or updating acquisition and/or processing functionalities. To unify data access methods, the concept of logical file is introduced as a special class of BDIM objects. The logical file does not necessitate the use of a specific declaration for the different kinds of images because it is possible, for a desired processing , to have access to the only concerned data.